Better Not To Tell You Now
by CiderApples
Summary: Simon Phillips'd had the right idea.  Get away: stay away.  Her life, like his, was different: not just a little different, and not just for a little while.
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: Quickly written, quickly posted (sorry for any mistakes). After last night, I had to throw something out there. Title is another possible reply from the Magic 8 Ball._

* * *

_Better Not Tell You Now_

* * *

Nina laid it out very clearly for her.

Olivia, in the metal and leather Massive Dynamic chair, listened carefully while Nina explained that it was imperative that she - and not her Alter - be Peter's choice. That the fate of the universes depended on it.

"I'm sorry," Olivia said, "I'm not sure I understand." But she _did _understand; she just couldn't believe what she was hearing. The fate of the universe would come down to whether or not she was _lovable._

This was not why she'd joined the FBI.

"Use _everything_ in your power," Nina suggested, eyebrow raised suggestively, and suddenly all her counseling about William Bell and feelings turned into pure horseshit.

Olivia stood up. She nodded.

"I understand," she said.

She left the room. She'd never be back.

If her universe ended, she'd never have the chance to regret it, anyway.

* * *

It took her one week to pack and vacate her apartment, which she managed to do in utter secrecy - eventually disappearing in the middle of the night, leaving only a note that nobody was to come after her - and then she was _un_packing in a cabin on a remote lake that she'd purchased for a song. Simon Phillips'd had the right idea. Get away: stay away. Her life, like his, was different: not just a little different, and not just for a little while.

She knew that, eventually, someone would track her down. They'd either knock at her door or they wouldn't, and she'd either open the door - or she wouldn't.

* * *

The knock comes a month after she moves in. She doesn't have a peephole so she goes around the back of the cabin and peers around the shingles.

"Oh," she says. He's staring right at her. "It's you."

He smiles. "Should've known, right?"

She sighs and follows him in through the front door she always keeps locked.

* * *

Coffee hits the table ten minutes later.

"Decaf," she says. "I switched."

"Feel better?"

"Yeah, actually. I do." She smiles over the lip of her mug. He takes it in. He's been scanning her cabin since he walked in.

"And how's that going for you?" he asks. She plays dumb to see what he's noticed.

"How's what going?"

"Lights, but no switches," he says, looking to her walls. "Locks, but no keys. No gun in your hand when you came out to greet me." Clasping his hands around his mug, he feels radiant heat. "Not to mention fresh coffee, but no power lines. And I don't hear a generator."

Olivia sits back in her wooden chair. "Not much else to do out here."

"But practice."

"Yeah." She sips. "But you knew I would."

"Admittedly true. Good coffee, by the way." Sam looks over the table. "Don't suppose you keep cows, too?"

"I still take it black," she says. "Sorry."

They drink coffee together, for a while, in silence. Then he asks her if she's still disappointed. Without clarification, she knows exactly what he means, and the answer is that she'll always be disappointed in how easily Nina and the others bought into that crock of shit Sam cooked up for them.

The fate of the universe coming down to Peter's crush? _Hell, no_. Seeing how readily Nina was willing to discard Olivia's own importance, her abilities, her central position in the events of both words, was a different kind of crushing. Worse, still, was hearing Nina discuss it with Walter while Olivia waited in the antechamber to her office. Hearing Walter quietly agree that he would help in any way he could.

"I'm sorry it had to hurt, kiddo," Sam says, seeing the look in her eyes.

"Still kinda does," she admits.

"If it makes you feel any better, those people _were _good for you. So good you might never have left on your own. And don't take it too personally: sometimes people just feel better when a man plays the hero."

"That's supposed to make me feel better about leaving?"

"No. The way you feel right _now_ is supposed to make you feel better about leaving."

"How do I feel?" she challenges. She's got a elbow on the table, hiding her face behind her mug.

"Powerful. Good. _Right_."

She nods.

"This _is _the right way," Sam assures her. "You know that, now."

"Yeah." It's getting dark outside. Olivia glances at the ceiling and the light bulb clicks alive.

"You never asked me for the truth," Sam says. Sitting forward in his chair, he pushes his empty mug beside hers. "That's not like you. I thought you'd come see me before you took off."

She shrugs. "Did you tell _them_ the truth? Yet?"

"They can't handle the truth," Sam grins.

"Can I?" Something darkens her eyes, even in the warm tungsten light.

"Oh, I think you can handle a lot more than that." Sam reaches into his pocket and brings out something quite small: a little metal pellet no bigger than a pill. He slides it across the table. "Don't you?"


	2. Chapter 2

_A/N: Okay. So. If you're still reading by now, I have to confess that I think you might be disappointed, b/c this fic is straight-up guilty crack. It's going to be shamelessly crossovery and not at all P/O. Just to make sure everyone is clear: NOT P/O. This is Olivia's liberation, and mine too, I guess, from the frustration of dealing with the P/O/Faux love triangle plot device. _

* * *

_Better Not Tell You Now_

_2._

* * *

Olivia reached for the metal object Sam had passed her. For all intents and purposes, it was a pill. She picked it up, held it between her fingers, and put it to her lips.

"Whoa," Sam said, calmly as ever. "What, are you gonna _eat _it?"

The thing was halfway in her mouth, so, _yeah_, she guessed she'd been about to. "I'm really hoping it isn't a suppository," she said, picking it off her tongue.

"Go figure. Can't give a pill-shaped anything to a lifetime lab rat." He steepled his hands on the table. "I thought you would have recognized that thing."

"From where?"

"From _whom._"

Olivia let the pill fall into her palm, and studied it. It still looked like a pill. Until it looked like something else. "No. Way," she said, like a high-schooler.

"Yeah. Way," Sam smirked.

"It's an implant," she said. She put the thing up to her face, snugged it against to the bridge of her nose. "It goes - _here_." She didn't need his confirmation to know she was correct. She did, however, give him a nasty side-eye as she tossed it back across the table at him. "And you can go pound sand up your ass if you think I'm going to put this in my head. I read through the X-Files before I joined Fringe division, and all accounts point to this thing being a bad deal."

"Okay." Sam sighed. "First, Scully's implant was version zero-point-zero, compared to this one. Second, it wasn't this little beauty that gave her cancer. It was the idiots in Washington and their misguided father-knows-best politics. That implant saved her life. If you'll work with me, here, _this_ implant's going to save yours. Bunch of other people's, too."

Olivia watched him place the implant directly at the center of her table, resting pleasantly at the dark center of a knot in the wood. She thought, hard, for so long that she forgot to keep the light bulb going. When it flickered out, she seemed startled.

"You're an alien," she accused finally, relighting the bulb. Sam raked a tired hand through his hair.

"That'd be something, wouldn't it."

"That wasn't a denial."

"I'm not an alien. I'm just a guy. Like you - except, you know, a _guy_."

Hairs all over Olivia's body were starting to stand on end. It might have been from running the electricity for so long, or it might have been the extremely creepy way Sam Weiss was starting to piece together in front of her. It occurred to her that she'd never really known much about him. "You," she said, "are _not _just a guy. You have information men have killed for, _been_ killed for, but you work at a bowling alley and live...probably in the bowling alley. You carried a piece of tech here in your pocket that has never even been confirmed by our government to _exist_."

"Yeah. Neat, huh?"

"Sam."

"Olivia." Sam smiled. "You should've been practicing patience along with all those magic abilities."

"I only have so much time in my days."

"Ironic."

"Why?"

"If you let me put this in your head, you'll have all the time in the world. And I mean that literally."

* * *

She _did _do it, eventually.

She argued with him, first: asked _'why?'_ and a whole slew of other questions. Passively sitting in her kitchen, he waited for her to run out.

"You done?" he said. "You want to sleep on it?"

She tossed her hair grumpily. "You _really _think I'm going to do this."

"I do. Because you're great, and you know it. You're something more than an ex-FBI agent who sits in a cabin and turns lights on and off with her mind, and you know that, too. But mostly? I think you're bored. You want to see what'll happen. You want to see just _how_ great you can be."

And.

Well.

She couldn't argue with that.


	3. Chapter 3

_A/N: Suddenly I just had to finish this one. Who knows, sometimes. _

* * *

_Better Not Tell You Now_

_3._

* * *

Six days after the surgery, Sam Weiss came around again. Minor surgery, he'd promised, but Olivia still had two black eyes and couldn't breathe through her nose.

"Brought you something," he said. Whatever it was, it wasn't in his hands. She ruled out alcohol, books, and food. How disappointing.

"If it's stuffed, you can throw it in the lake." She'd gotten her fill of civilization (going back to that hospital and its endless streams of well-wishers and food that even Walter would have refused - back, of course, when she'd known Walter) and didn't want any keepsakes.

"It's too heavy to throw," Sam said. He peered at the bridge of her nose, but her scar was interior. Turning off her front porch, he kicked some moss off a step and ambled toward her backyard. "Come on," he called, "let's screw."

* * *

The invitation was both literal and misleading.

"Funny," Olivia said, "'screwing' used to be a two-person job." Her mind turned the thick hooks into her poor old sugar maples, while her hands - not quite strong enough for the task - rested dominantly on her hips.

"Old lives, huh?" Sam said.

The thing he'd brought her was a hammock: cottony rope, with two wooden bars and a metal chain at each end that could leash a tiger. They strung it up and it hung there, waiting. She thought: why a hammock? Did she seem like the kind of person who relaxed for fun?

"You don't have to like it," he said, folding the box into a cardboard book. "But you should have it."

"Why?"

"Always with a 'why.' Ever think that, sometimes, there isn't one?"

"Not with you." Experimentally, she pushed the hammock. It swayed. No surprises.

"Maybe so." He reached out, let the rope scrape over his fingers. "Next time, I'll bring wine."

"Vodka."

"Bourbon."

"Is anything supposed to be _happening_?" she asked, like she'd suddenly jumped in from a different conversation, because he hadn't said a word about the implant since she'd had it put in her head, and it was getting on her nerves. Since the surgery, the two black eyes were _all_ she'd had, and, not that he'd promised her anything specific, but 'all the time in the world' had sounded like code for something fantastic.

"Enjoy the hammock," Sam said, on his way out. He was past the rock wall in her front yard by the time he turned back. "Nice shiners, by the way."

* * *

Damn Sam Weiss, but the pendulum motion of the hammock turned out to be, counter-intuitively, a perfect remedy for the nausea that cropped up the day after he left: the chip kicking in, maybe.

Olivia laid in the hammock, staring up at the leaves, and tried to relax into the throbbing behind her eyes. It didn't hurt, exactly, but it wasn't pleasant, either. A leaf fell, drifting toward her face, and she was too lazy to wave it away but suddenly the leaf was drifting backwards, up, until it reattached to the branch. And that's how she discovered that she could move in time.

* * *

The thing that bugged her was _why_.

Sam laughed when she said so, because of all the people on the planet, she was probably the only one who'd question why she'd been offered the keys to the universe's convertible. But, after he was done laughing, he still wouldn't answer her question. So she went looking for someone who might; someone who'd had a similar foreign object put in a similar place; someone who might have, at some point, discovered its purpose.

* * *

The listed number for Dana Scully went immediately to an FBI voicemail prompt. Olivia didn't know what she'd been expecting - a pick up? A warm hello? A willingness to rehash the most painful parts of her past with a complete stranger? She left a voicemail anyway, and a few days later, she got a text.

_No, thank you._

And that was the end of that.

* * *

It was the middle of the afternoon - broad daylight, a beautiful day - when the aliens showed up. There were no beams of light, no mind-control rays, no spaceships nor cloud formations nor panic in the streets. Just a calm couple of aliens knocking on her door. Oh, and Sam, too.

Sam left the aliens outside for a minute and walked Olivia into the kitchen.

"Sorry," he said, "this is a little ahead of schedule."

"There was a schedule?"

"Not like a plan; more like a forecast."

"Why are they here?" she asked. If there was something she was supposed to do about it, he probably should have taught her to do it before now.

"They're stuck. That thing you did back in Boston, with Peter and the machine: it conjoined some timelines, made some superdense spacetime, twisted their dimension up pretty good. Their primary dimension being our fourth."

"And the solution to that is...?"

For the first time, Sam seemed _not-_deliberately lost for words. "Well," he said, "think of it as reformatting."

"But why are they _here_?" she asked again, making it clear that she was talking about her doorstep, not her planet. "What am I supposed to _do_?"

"Apparently," he said, "you're the only sentient life form on this planet, by their standards. They'll only talk to _you_." She blinked. "You are truly, officially four-dimensional. We call it time travel; they call it 'free will.' Potato, potahto."

"The implant did this?"

"_You _did this. The implant just...facilitated." He sat at her table like it was for the last time. "Look, we were supposed to have a little more time. A little more development, for you. Really, we were supposed to have had the last thirty years, but then Peter happened."

She gave no sign of understanding.

"Peter was a mistake," Sam told her. "In every way. Shouldn't have lived, shouldn't have been taken, shouldn't have grown up. The machine was only ever built to deal with the problem of _Peter_, and that machine is what screwed us up, brought _them_ here, way ahead of schedule.

"You were only supposed to be an ambassador. Every so-many-millions of years, somebody - somebody from out there - shows up here. And either we have someone who can negotiate - intelligently, _advanced-_ly - or we don't. Six great extinctions, right? Six visits _sine legato_."

"So..." Olivia didn't know what to say. "The rest of us? Nick Lane?"

"Had potential. But you were the best. You were the _one_."

Despite the gravity of the situation, Olivia'd waited a long time to hear that - to have something with which to overwrite the slap in the face of everyone kneeling at Peter Bishop's throne - and she smiled. The lights in her kitchen glowed a little brighter.

"You can thank me later," Sam said, and then: "Hey," and his calm slipped a little. "If they make you an offer, remember who your friends are."

There was an awkward moment where she realized she'd forgotten that Sam was entirely human.

* * *

The aliens were compassionate, at least, to what they recognized as a sentient life form. They were willing to set aside a reserve, a sanctuary, when the rest of the world got reformatted. Where did she want it to be?

She thought hard.

When the aliens went, she made two phone calls.

"Peter," she said, for the first, into his voicemail. "You and Walter...stay in Boston. If you're not in Boston, be in Boston. By tomorrow. Tell Astrid, and Broyles." She paused. "And...anyone else you might have."

"Rachel," she opened, for the second. "You need to come visit."

She thought about calling Scully again, but didn't. She sent a text, and thought, _good luck_.

* * *

After the world ended, Olivia didn't see the aliens again. She was aware that everything beyond the greater Boston area was gone, but within those limits, everything seemed all right, almost unchanged: there weren't many people left, and she'd commandeered an empty house with a significant yard, down the street from her sister, across town from Peter, a few blocks from Sam. Lots of privacy. She supposed she should take up gardening.

As it turned out, the aliens had been far kinder than she'd imagined: they'd left her a space that was infinitely deep. If she took advantage of it, she could travel quite far.


End file.
